From the Time of Art to the Time of Life

For 15 years the architects Abdeslam Faraoui and Patrice de Mazières collaborated with artists to create a typology of works and objects termed Les Intégrations (Integrations) specially designed for public infrastructure, thus promoting art’s participation in the renewal of Morocco’s society and urban fabric. In the face of an academic tradition inherited from colonialism, the artistic interventions implemented by the firm Faraoui and de Mazières highlighted Morocco’s counter-cultural spirit, one where transdisciplinary cross-pollinations between literature and poetry, the visual arts, and design and architecture did not crystallize so much in aesthetic claims as give substance to the possibility of an emancipatory modernity, participating in the subordination of art-time to life-time.

This spirit was embodied in a global emancipatory impulse instantiated in the participation of artists and intellectuals working in pan-African networks1 as well as cultural trajectories within Morocco, and emanating from Morocco. Embodying this dynamic, the sculpture exposition organized by Mathias Goeritz on the occasion of the Mexico City Olympic Games brought together international artists from all five continents, including Mohamed Melehi, representing the African delegation, to produce monumental sculptures lining the road linking the city to the Olympic village—officially known as the "friendship road.”2 Toni Maraini and Mohamed Melehi were joined by Pauline and Patrice de Mazières on this occasion. Mohamed Melehi thus brought to the international public stage the experimental approach recommended by the Casablanca School of Fine Arts to applied arts and architecture, creating a monumental sculpture in public space. It was also on this occasion that he first met Herbert Bayer, an artist from the Bauhaus movement, who was later to settle in Tangier in the late 1970s. These trajectories thus materialized a physical movement—that of artists and intellectuals—alongside a theoretical one—that of the circulation of thoughts—in which the Bauhaus became a touchstone within Morocco.

1. Common Thoughts / Communities of Thought?

Les Intégrations exemplified a specific conceptual motif, one that acted not within a single field but rather implied a relationship of interdependence between different media (visual arts and architecture) and techniques (those of graphic arts and architecture). They thus allowed for the emergence of disciplines that were not static in formation but evolving in relation to one another. The intermedial relationship they created between art and architecture raises the question of what lies "between" these disciplines: how do they communicate with each other? What are the elements of language common to this "spirit of the times," to the particular atmosphere of the late 1960s?

Experimenting with practices between the major and minor arts implied not only the invention of new modes of transmission across disciplines but also between creative works and the general public. Artists and intellectuals of the time turned resolutely towards public space as a site for debate and a place for expressing contradictory opinions. Such an orientation also suggested that artists and intellectuals should be actively involved in the life of society. This proposition contained within it an implicit question regarding the artist's social role. Such modes of transmission from the different disciplines to public space were based, first of all, on the creation of cultural magazines (Souffles, Integral, Maghreb Art), providing a theoretical basis for subsequent interventions in public space and the participation of artists in urban projects: as producers of site-specific works; in the field of interior decoration; in the creation of posters and advertising; and furniture design and manufacture. This network of mobile relationships made visible a desire for freedom, expressed in the battle against processes of historical fixation where anthropological and archaeological museums acted as depositaries producing identity assignments that restricted the significations of a material culture the Moroccan cultural scene claimed as inherently hybrid.3 Acting against the essentialization of folk art by such institutions, artists, poets, writers, intellectuals, filmmakers, architects and others united in opposition, proposing a set of objects to be studied not with a view to constituting a history of forms but a history of forms in relation to one another.

In 1962 Farid Belkahia returned to Morocco after studying at the Paris School of Fine Arts (1956–1959) and the Prague Theatre Academy (1959–1962). His career path was not unique. It bore a similarity to that of several artists he later recruited to teach at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts, including Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa. These cosmopolitan cultural trajectories formed a moving cartography of modernities that helped to situate artistic practices in 1960s Morocco within a global movement where art was also seen as an agent to express social and political demands. The cultural events organized in Morocco from the 1950s to the mid-1960s by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the few existing Moroccan art galleries encouraged a neo-orientalist academic trend that served as a standard for Moroccan artistic production, highlighting its enchantment and naïveté4 and thus denying art’s liberating and autonomous potential.5 The public space, the street space, by contrast, welcomed the vital momentum of a generation of artists who sought to inaugurate new strategies for the exhibition and reception of works of art. This vital momentum also freed up the possibility of aesthetic filiations outside institutions, acting as a kind of "ephemeral museum." According to Abdelkebir Khattibi:

"The ancestors have not disappeared, their traces are alive, and their memory has taken to the streets. To be convinced, it would be enough to immerse oneself in the scenography repeated from century to century of popular culture and its production of signs. The Arab artist is strongly influenced by it. It is his chance, his risk in the face of the constraints of the past, of his living and surviving tradition.”6

Patrice de Mazières was already an architect—just like his father and grandfather before him—when in 1967 he met Mohamed Melehi and Toni Maraini at one of the art openings where the cosmopolitan and vibrant Casablanca cultural scene congregated. He was accompanied by his wife, Pauline de Mazières, who in 1971 opened the first modern independent art gallery, l'Atelier, in Rabat. Together with Sylvia Belhassan, her collaborator for 20 years, she established a rampart against the institutionalized currents of fine art; a formidable springboard for a modern Maghreb artistic modernity badly in need of visibility. This meeting between the architect and the Casablanca Group provided a new impetus to the transdisciplinary practices already being initiated at the Casablanca school. These relied in particular on the financial support of the Moroccan state,7 which financed—sometimes unwittingly—a series of artistic commissions carried out between 1967 and 1982 in some 20 state-funded public infrastructure projects. These infrastructure projects corresponded to two recent political orientations: the deployment of a national tourist network in rural areas demonstrating economic potential, and the creation of a variety of civil administration authorities—such as banks, prefectures and university departments. However, those advocating a coordinated cultural policy that would be supportive of artistic creation were in the minority at the time (especially after the ongoing government crackdown against opposition movements—of which the cultural scene was a part—became more vigorous following two failed coups d'état in 1971 and 1972 against King Hassan II, leading to the arrest of the main creative force and founders of the Souffles magazine, notably Abdellatif Laabi, Abraham Serfaty and Mohamed Chabâa).

2. Présence Plastique vs Integrations

The transdisciplinary practices that were formulated as operating within public space—even if they originated within the symbolic site of the editorial spaces where many artists were involved—gave rise from 1969 onwards to two artistic orientations, manifested in the Présence Plastique exhibition cycle and the artistic interventions in architecture carried out in the Integrations project.

The first Présence Plastique exhibition was organized on Jema el-Fna Square in Marrakech. A later incarnation occurred on 16 November 1969 in Casablanca. These were followed in 1971 by two exhibitions, also held in Casablanca, in the public high schools Fatem-Zahra and Mohamed V in 1971. These actions were developed out of a desire to invent new exhibition models that would present an alternative to official exhibitions and fairs. Public space thus becomes a modality for both aesthetic creation and existence, allowing for the expression of a new aesthetic trend. This series of exhibitions was also developed in order to create (political and cultural) momentum: the work existed in the moment of their manifestation and through an encounter with the public. The plastic nature of the works thus also functioned as a claim: "We also wanted to awaken this man's interest, his curiosity, his critical spirit, to stimulate him, to do in such a way that he integrates new plastic expressions into his rhythm of life, into his daily space.”8 This cycle of exhibitions also possessed a projective dimension: its participants adopted the principle of advertising, communicating with the spectator from a distance and through the mediating function of the artworks.

Speeches and writings regarding these exhibitions, in particular those published in the journals Souffles and Integral, called for a set of perceptual strategies that often highlighted different or even opposing biases. Présence Plastique sought to present artistic works, paintings, to the general public in urban space, but these were separated from this same public by security barriers which created two symbolic spaces: the world of fiction and the real world of the spectators. Staging the paintings in this way revealed the essentially theatrical nature of Présence Plastique, whose conceptual origins lay both in the reality and temporality of the city square and the audience/performer relationship of halqa shows.9 By contrast, Integrations sought to create a relationship with the object characterized not by a public recognition that would reveal their fictional character and lead to an appreciation of the works’ artistic value, but by creating instances of architectonic ornamentation indifferent to artistic spectatorship. Instead, the “object” was judged by its ability to blend into architectonic space, to adapt to its physical constraints or to respect specifications defined by the infrastructure project’s architects.

The debates surrounding the reception of works, however, also included a consideration of strategies that might be employed so as to cultivate a new post-independence audience—one previously excluded from cultural activities. This concern brought together the entire artistic community. In this respect, the figure of the illiterate, widely cited in modern literature but also in writings and speeches on art, came to embody a new public, one whose knowledge was based on iconographic traditions found in rural cultural practices: folk art, oral poetry, song and dance. In Ahmed Bouanani's work,10 the illiterate is not the one without access to education but the one detached from traditional, local knowledge forfeited through formal education, particularly during the colonial period. Both sorts of interventions in public space employed similar strategies to involve a new audience, in the sense that a visual memory game was played with the viewer, organized around ascertaining the gap between the sign and the meaning of the image: in order to reconstruct its meaning, the viewer was required to recognize the origins of the signs taken from the popular imagery that composed the work. This is particularly the case in Farid Belkahia's paintings, which uses techniques inspired by folk art, such as leather or metal work, as well as iconography inspired by Berber tattooing.11 The imaginary potential of folk art and the part reconstitution plays in it implies a paradigmatically different relationship between audience and creator, contributing to the writing of alternative narratives about art and its practices. In itself, this use of the grey area of tradition reflects a modern creation, filling in the blank spaces of history, partially reconstructed with the help of a public who share and employ the same vocabulary. Both Integrations and Présence Plastique thus reflect the crucial issue of building a new audience.

Painted Ceiling of a Souss mosque illustrating the article "Notes on the paintings and mosques of the Souss" by Mohamed Melehi, in: Maghreb Art, No. 3, published by the School of Fine Arts of Casablanca, 1969, p. 9.

3. Offence of Authenticity

Through their transdisciplinary nature and the different perceptual strategies they implemented, Moroccan artists' interventions in the public space crystallized the appearance of new practices that no longer satisfied the aesthetic categories of the Protectorate or the museological typologies requiring that authenticity be based on so-called ethnic and territorial origin. Integrations thus reflects a fragmentation of disciplines and categories and a set of common concerns both aesthetic and political in nature. Among these concerns was the need to find an aesthetic language that was neither a restrictive expression of national culture nor a demonstration of Western categorical injunctions. The desire to break down practices was reflected in the choices promoted by the artists of the Casablanca Group. In particular, the work of Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa symbolize this desire for openness in the way each artist incorporated graphic arts and design into their practice.12

Among their architectural achievements, two hotels in the Dades Valley of the Souss region in southern Morocco—Les Gorges du Dadès and Les Roses du Dadès—are of special interest. At the time these hotels were built in 1970, the Souss region had become an object of growing interest on the part of artists and intellectuals. This interest was motivated by the desire to uncover know-how and ways-of-doing particular to the region, which had been marginalized during the Protectorate and whose cultures remained mostly absent from the collections of anthropology museums. The nature of this material culture, whose development, it is claimed, was the product of a combination of pre-Islamic, sub-Saharan and Mediterranean influences, supported the discourse on origins that must be sought outside the classical heritage/tradition. From 1966 onwards Bert Flint led excursions to the region in which Toni Maraini, Melehi and Chabâa participated. The aim of these journeys was to research a culture on the verge of extinction, and the group acted in accordance with what they saw as an urgent need to document this little-known culture. They were also alert to the possibilities this relatively unstudied culture presented for inventing new typologies and mobilizing a field of knowledge around cultural objects that had not yet been fixed within a dominant cognitive system. The Souss region thus acted as a catalyst for fomenting cultural practices with the potential to function as acts of resistance in the post-independence period, making it impossible to distance artistic from political acts.

Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa produced wooden and ceramic wall panels for the restaurant and reception rooms of Les Roses du Dadès hotel. One of the most emblematic works in this series is Melehi's wall ceiling in one of the hotel's several lounges. The wide ceiling is composed of wooden panels that play on a variation of undulating and colored patterns. The combinatorial play of motifs created a rigorously composed pictorial surface reminiscent of Melehi's previous encounter in America with geometric abstraction. This composition was conceived in alternating panels reproduced in series, predominantly red or blue in color, evoking the objectivity of American painting of the 1960s. However, the characteristic colored waves of Melehi's work of the time are also addressed in his writings, which might be described as autobiographical prisms, referencing the situation of his native city Asilah (bordering the Atlantic Ocean) and historical reference point such as prehistoric Saharan symbols and vernacular folk art.13

Melehi's painted ceiling was based on the translation of an iconographic corpus from a liturgical context to a strictly decorative and commercial context. Its immediate source was a traditional ceiling pattern discovered by Bert Flint in the rural mosques of the Souss region in 1965, photographs of which were subsequently published in the third issue of Maghreb Art magazine in 1969.14 Melehi reinforced the idea of a formal similarity between the iconography of the painted ceilings of the Souss and his own graphic universe, one based on the spatial experience of the spectator. Indeed, the artist relied on an associative transfer from spiritual contexts and experiences to aesthetic secular experience, suggesting a genealogical relationship based on the repetition of the same gesture: lifting the head to view the painted surface. It is thus worth noting how this modern practice implemented in public space, which can be considered as emblematic of the intention of Integrations as a whole, was conceived in opposition to the idea of rupture inherent in modernity by basing itself on a visual tradition and on a community of experience. Melehi's painted ceiling crystallizes the challenge inherent in re-appropriating a particular material cultural form, pointing towards a critique of the phenomena of patrimonialization. Being that it was also the result of a collaboration between architects and artists, the work makes visible more tangible links in how art can function as a social object, reinforcing the need to interrogate museum practices by participating in the invention of new museal forms based on formal experimentation and the experience of the viewer.

The other Integrations conceived in the same area was by Mohamed Chabâa, who created a series of ceiling lights and hotel signs for both Les Roses du Dadès and Les Gorges du Dadès. The ceiling lamps reflect an interest in constructivist and kinetic sculpture—two movements regularly mentioned by Moroccan artists, particularly in Souffles15. Its set of geometric lines also recalls the experiments of the graphic arts workshop Chabâa directed at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca, particularly those conceived for Koufi typography, for which he developed a new stylistic approach. This typographic revival also characterized the hotel signs, that utilized a kufic calligraphic style. Chabâa's typographic work is in line with the claims of the artists of hurufiyyâ (a pan-Arabic form of lettrism), a movement of artists who based their work on a practice of abstraction rooted in Islamic heritage, which in reality brought together extremely diverse practices using the Arabic alphabet as one of the components of a new complex and mixed language.

Conclusion

By moving away from the conventional spaces of demonstration, Integrations created alternative spaces, making it possible to assign new values to art objects. Integrations’ strategies of integrating art-time into life-time in the 1960s also exerted an influence on more recent practices, such as the creation of murals in public spaces—for instance, the Moussem d'Asilah created in 1978—or interventions by the Berrechid psychiatric hospital in 1981. Moreover, the set of media, practices and strategies that comprised Integrations contained an implicit critique of museal practice as a cultural vector and actor within cultural heritage as such. Additionally, the breaking down of barriers between high and low culture also gave rise to a typology of transdisciplinary objects that encompassed design, graphics, architecture and folk art, and attempted to requalify their belonging to modernity. In comparison with the international phenomena that comprise a modernist project in which the assimilation of artisanal practices to artistic practices was placed at the service of both innovation and rationalization, Integrations allow us to think of another form of material culture working not in the service of innovation as economic and commercial progress, but rather to a vernacular form of modernism. According to Peter Limbrick,16 this vernacular modernism characterized the modern artistic period in Morocco and allowed for a re-evaluation of the conflict between local knowledge and modernity to be aired. Doing so allowed for the incorporation of diverse vernacular practices to enter into the field of a modernity under negotiation, one in which cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses were both at play. The Integrations project thus gave substance to a counter-cultural movement in Morocco where the inclusion of artistic practices in public space pursued two concomitant strategies: on the artistic level it was a question of making visible a host of previously invisible spectators; on the social level the creation of new forms of sociability affirmed art as an agent of social transformation.

2 While the Mexican government sought to use the 1968 Summer Olympics (held from October 12 – 27) to raise its international profile and affiliation with other postcolonial regimes (investing a massive $150 million in preparation for hosting the games, an amount equal to roughly $1 billion in today’s dollar), the games themselves were preceded by waves of student protest, in solidarity with government crackdowns against labor union and farmer agitation. After the government’s violation of university autonomy over the summer, a National Strike Council (CNH), a democratic delegation of students from 70 Mexican universities and preparatory schools charged with coordinating further protests promoting social, educational and political reforms, was formed. The CNH were the organizers of a massive protest at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on October 2, to which government forces responded with special vehemence, arresting students and bystanders en masse, and killing scores of protesters. Known today as the Tlatelolco massacre, the number of dead may never be fully known, but contemporary estimates are that between 300 and 400 individuals were killed by government forces. The memory of the massacre was still fresh when the Mexico City Olympics opened ten days later: the games themselves were not without further controversy. Karoline Noack references the massacre in her text on the TGP (Taller de Gráfica Popular) in this journal. Please see: www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/2444/the-workshop-for-popular-graphic-art-in-mexico-bauhaus-travels-to-america.

4 “A controversy will arise, around the manipulation of the concepts of ‘naivety’ and ‘spontaneity’ then invested with a romantic aura and projected on authors very different in gender, quality and personality.” Toni Maraini: “Au rendez-vous de l'histoire: la peinture,” p. 84, in: Ecrits sur l'art, Editions Le Fennec, Casablanca 2014.

7 The artists’ interventions were often disguised within the architectural specifications and referenced under less problematic names—as indicated in the note of intent drawn up by the Faraoui and Mazières firm, who stated: “all joint projects will often be carried out without the project owners' knowledge.” Abdeslam Faraoui et Patrice de Mazières, “Note d’intention: 15 années de collaboration architectes–peintres,” archives du Cabinet Faraoui et De Mazières, non daté, archives: Cabinet Faraoui et de Mazières.

8 This sentence comes from an anonymous manifesto later acknowledged to have been written by Toni Maraini. “Action plastique: exhibition jamâa lfna Marrakech,” pp. 45–46, in: Souffles, No. 13/14, 1969.

9 A Halqa is the names for the circle of spectators who form around artists performing in a public square, which by extension refers as well to art shows taking place in public space.

11 “Many of the motifs used by Farid Belkahia are inspired by the heritage of tattoos and the signs/symbols that adorn objects of traditional folk art, because, being pre-calligraphic, these elements refer to a whole problem of the sign—and the pleasure of the sign—that modern art has brought to us from the depths of the collective consciousness.” In: Toni Maraini: “Farid Belkahia ‘The important thing is to feel good about yourself,’” p. 84, in: Ecrits sur l'art, Editions Le Fennec, Casablanca 2014.

12 Mohamed Melehi was working to define a common graphic language for interventions in public space. This intention is visible particularly in the editorial line of Souffles magazine and the poster designed for the first independent exhibition of the Casablanca Group, organized in Rabat by Toni Maraini at the Mohamed V National Theatre in 1966. Belkahia, Chabâa and Melehi all participated. Mohamed Chabâa also worked in a transdisciplinary artistic environment through multiple collaborations in the field of design and architecture.

13 Toni Maraini, “A Study on the Work of Mohamed Melehi,” in: Mohamed Melehi, Melehi. Recent Paintings, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York 1984.

14 The allusion to this corpus first appeared in 1965 in Bert Flint's text “Caractéristiques des arts populaires,” p. 20, in: Maghreb Art No. 2, published by the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca, 1966. “The painting of these ceilings,” Flint wrote, “must already be considered of the greatest interest for the history of Moroccan art and perhaps for art history in general.” The subject was also treated three years later in an article by Mohamed Melehi, published in the last issue of Maghreb Art magazine. See: “Notes on the paintings of the mosques and zaouias of Souss,” p. 7. In: Maghreb Art, No. 3, 1969.

Maud Houssais

Maud Houssais is an independent researcher. Her research focuses on the elaboration of an alternative art scene in Morocco from the 1960s, with a particular focus on discourses and artistic practices in the public space. → more

The symposium Learning From in New York explored what it means to take cultural artifacts and inscribe them within a new context, whether by nineteenth century ethnographic museums, avant-garde artist, in teaching collections, or contemporary art projects. Prior to the symposium, a group of artists, designers, curators and art historians toured museums archives and studios around New York, examining and discussing a variety of materials, ranging from Mesoamerican artefacts to the work of the mid-century artists who found inspiration in these collections. → more

This text investigates how the topological figure of the Möbius strip, famously propagated by Bauhaus proponent Max Bill, was used in Brazil within dissident artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s as a tool for reflection on the subject, alterity and public space. The Möbius strip is revisited in this essay as a conduit for thinking critically about possible subversions of Eurocentric forms, as well as various appropriations of traditional popular culture by modern and contemporary art in Brazil. → more

This text deals with the experience of the Museum of Popular Art (MAP) and the School of Industrial Design and Handicraft, designed by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in Salvador (capital of the state of Bahia), Brazil. Such a “school-museum” is based on the capture and transformation of latent forces that exist in Brazilian popular culture. → more

No matter how distanced we are from our collective origins in systems of mutual reciprocity and exchange, these activities remain “full of rituals and rights.” It was precisely this conception of systems of exchange as intrinsically connected to magical power, ritual, and ceremony that four prominent Seattle businessmen seized upon when they invented the Golden Potlatch, a city-wide festival that rather artfully combined the just-passed prosperity of the Klondike Gold Rush with the mutual reciprocity that is the basis of “potlatch” ceremonies customary in certain Native North American societies, particularly in the northwest of the American continent. → more

In sending out the manuscript of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture to a publisher, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy added a note on the “Genesis of the manuscript,” which is quite revealing about the intellectual trajectory that gave rise to it. She positioned herself as first and foremost a traveling observer, learning from direct contact with artefacts and buildings, curious about their histories and willing to interpret material evidence and local narratives. → more

The Mexico of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was a fertile ground for the development of ideological questions, especially those originating from the left. The expropriation of oil fields, mining and large estates in 1938, the refuge granted Spanish republicans and members of the International Brigades in 1939, and the accord of mutual support between the government and syndicalist organizations all favored the formation of artistic and cultural groups willing to take part in the consolidation of revolutionary ideals which, until that point, had made little progress. Among these organizations was the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the Workshop of Popular Graphics. → more

The search for the spiritual characterized Tawney’s long life, and was reflected in both the iconography and materials she used in her work. She was a regular diarist and her journals provide valuable insight into this deeply personal search. bauhaus imaginista researcher Erin Freedman interviews Executive Director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Kathleen Nugent Mangan, about Tawney's approach and work. → more

The story of Lena Bergner is relevant to the history of architecture and design on account of her career passing through different ideological and cultural contexts. Here we will discuss her life and work, focusing on her training in the Bauhaus, her time in the USSR and her time in Mexico, where, along with her husband the architect Hannes Meyer, over a ten-year period she undertook cultural projects of great importance. → more

Cristine Takuá is an indigenous philosopher, educator, and artisan who lives in the village of Rio Silveira, state of São Paulo, Brazil. She was invited to present a contemporary perspective on questions and tensions raised by interactions between the indigenous communities and the mainstream art system, as well as to address Brazil’s specific social and political context. → more

Not by nature acquisitive and certainly not art collectors, Josef and Anni Albers began in 1936 to collect Mexican figurines and other artifacts unearthed from that land’s memory. They described the country, which they first visited in 1935, as “the promised land of abstract art.” Returning to Black Mountain College Anni Albers and Alexander Reed began experimenting with everyday articles to create a strange and beautiful collection of objects of personal adornment inspired by their visit to Mexico. → more

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy understood herself as a traveling observer. In her book Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture Moholy-Nagy sought buildings that survived time because they had developed naturally out of the North American reality. In doing so she did not define one style, method or area but rather showed how builders found creative solutions to specific problems of site, climate, materials and skills. → more

The global developments that led in 1942 to the appointment of Hannes Meyer, second Bauhaus director, as head of the workshop for popular graphic art, Taller de Gráfica Popular (henceforth referred to as the TGP), made it a focal point for migrating Europeans in flight from fascism. This essay aims to shed light on how the TGP was influenced by Europeans granted asylum by Mexico before and during World War Two, and, conversely, to explore the degree to which these exiled visual artists, writers, and architects’ ideas came to be influenced by their contact with artists active in the TGP. → more

The need for a synthesis of the arts and, with this, a change of pedagogical principles, was not only present at the beginning of the twentieth century (forces that prompted the Bauhaus’s foundation), but after WWII as well, during the “Short Century”of decolonization. . This second modern movement and its relation to modernism and the vernacular, the hand made, and the everyday was vividly expressed through texts and art works published in the Moroccan quarterly magazine Souffles, published beginning in the mid-1960s by a group of writers and artists in Rabat, Casablanca and Paris. → more

In the years when Western nations were committed in new projects of partnership, with what was then called the “Third World”, young artists and students from the Maghreb had grown up in the passionate climate of the struggle for independence, were talented, open to modernity, and eager to connect with twentieth-century international art movements, which were different in production and spirit from colonial ideology and culture. → more

I was sixteen years old when I undertook my first journey into finding a professional vocation, first in Asilah, then in Fez followed by Tétouan. 1952. Tangiers was, to me, an open book, a window on the world. The freedom of seeing, of discovering and of feeling, of weaving the narratives of my dreams. → more

Mohamed Chabâa’s consciousness of his national heritage and his interest in architecture both emerged at a young age. His concept of the “3 A’s”—art, architecture and the arts and crafts—grew out of his discovery both of the Italian Renaissance and the Bauhaus School during a period of study in Rome in the early 1960s. From then on, bringing together the “3 A’s” would become a central interest, a concept Chabâa would apply in various ways and fiercely defend throughout his long and varied career. → more

Looking into the history of objects, into their original practical and social function as well as into the circumstances of their transition to European and other countries of Western civilization, the artist Kader Attia aims at conveying the full identity of the objects and to follow the traces of their disappearance that still can be discovered today and call for repair. → more

On the 24th and 25th of March 2018, we met in Rabat to participate in the first event of the bauhaus imaginista project. We were attending a workshop with the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, surrounded by an exhibition of archival materials from artists and students from the École des Beaux Arts in Casablanca and including the Maghreb Art magazine on the walls of Le Cube — independent art space that hosted Attia's show in Rabat. → more

Paul Klee’s Carpet, 1927, creates a conundrum for scholars as it does not neatly fit the existing theoretical models concerning how European artists engage with non-Western art and culture, while at the same time opening up exciting new avenues for inquiry. → more

This is the transcript of a conversation between art historian Erin Freedman and the trans artist and scholar Sebastian De Line that took place during the bauhaus imaginista: Learning From symposium at the Goethe-Institut in New York in June 2018. → more

At the time Anni Albers wrote On Weaving in 1965, few discussions of Andean textiles “as art” had appeared in weaving textbooks, but there were numerous publications, many of which were German books published between 1880 and 1929, that documented and described their visual and technical properties. Albers almost single-handedly introduced weaving students to this ancient textile art through her writing and her artistic work. → more

Ancient and indigenous textile cultures of the Americas played a critical role in the development of the work of fiber artists who came of age in the U.S. in the late 1950s and 1960s. Anyone who has studied fiber art of this period, myself included, knows this well. They openly professed an admiration for traditions ranging from Navaho weaving, to the use of the backstrap loom in Mexico and Central America, to the ancient weaving techniques of Peru. → more

In this recorded interview, Vicuña describes how after she first learned about quipu, she immediately integrated the system into her life. Quipu, the Spanish transliteration of the word for “knot” in Cusco Quechua, is a system of colored, spun and plied or waxed threads or strings made from cotton or camelid fiber. They were used by the Inca people for a variety of administrative purposes, mainly record-keeping, and also for other ends that have now been lost to history. → more

One primary question leading up to the bauhaus imaginista workshop and symposium had concerned the extent to which Bauhaus artists had been culturally informed by and subsequently appropriated Indigenous art. This essay examines ethnographic and natural history museology and how Indigenous cultures are perceived, translated and exhibited through Westernized perspectives that are informed by a philosophical subject-object divide. → more

“I felt as if I had made a step and maybe a new form. These evolved from a study of Peruvian techniques, out of twining and twisting. Out of that came my new way of working, of dividing and separating the piece.” Lenore Tawney’s “Woven Forms” are not purpose-built in a (Western) crafts sense; they move beyond traditional European rules of weaving and attempt to approach an indigenous attitude towards craft and technique. This essay shows how Tawney charted her own unique path in fiber art by linking Amerindian impulses with Taoist concepts of space and Bauhaus ideas. → more